My friend Sir Roger De Coverley, when we last met together at the
club, told me that he had a great mind to see the new tragedy with me,
assuring me, at the same time, that he had not been at a play these
twenty years. “The last I saw,” said Sir Roger, “was the Committee,
which I should not have gone to neither, had I not been told beforehand
that it was a good Church of England comedy.” He then proceeded to
inquire of me who this distressed mother was; and upon hearing that
she was Hector’s widow, he told me that her husband was a brave man,
and that when he was a school boy he had read his life at the end of
the dictionary. My friend asked me, in the next place, if there would
not be some danger in coming home late, lest the Mohocks should be
abroad. “I assure you,” says he, “I thought I had fallen into their
hands last night; for I observed two or three lusty black men that
followed me half way up Fleet Street, and mended their pace behind me,
in proportion as I put on to get away from them. You must know,” said
the Knight with a smile, “I fancied they had a mind to hunt me; for I
remember an honest gentleman in my neighborhood, who was served such a
trick in King Charles the Second’s time; for which reason he has not
ventured himself in town ever since. I might have shown them very good
sport, had this been their design; for as I am an old fox hunter, I
should have turned and dodged, and have played them a thousand tricks
they had never seen in their lives before.” Sir Roger added, that if
these gentlemen had any such intention, they did not succeed very well
in it; “for I threw them out,” says he, “at the end of Norfolk Street,
where I doubled the corner and got shelter in my lodgings before they
could imagine what had become of me, however,” says the knight, “if
Captain Sentry will make one with us tomorrow night, and you will both
call on me about four o’clock, that we may be at the house before it
is full, I will have my own coach in readiness to attend you, for John
tells me he has got the fore wheels mended.”
The Captain, who did not fail to meet me there at the appointed hour,
bid Sir Roger fear nothing, for that he had put on the same sword
which he made use of at the battle of Steenkirk. Sir Roger’s servants,
and among the rest my old friend the butler, had, I found, provided
themselves with good oaken plants, to attend their master on this
occasion. When he had placed him in the coach, with myself at his
left hand, the Captain before him, and his butler at the head of his
footmen in the rear, we convoyed him in safety to the play house,
where, after having marched up the entry in good order, the Captain
and I went in with him, and seated him betwixt us in the pit. As soon
as the house was full, and the candles were lighted, my old friend
stood up and looked about him with that pleasure, which a mind seasoned
with humanity naturally feels in itself, at the sight of a multitude
of people who seem pleased with one another, and partake of the same
common entertainment, I could not but fancy to myself as the old man
hearing a cluster of them praise Orestes, struck in with them, and told
them, that he thought his friend Pylades was a very sensible man; as
they were afterwards applauding Pyrrhus Sir Roger put in a second time:
“And let me tell you,” says he, “though he speaks but little, I like
the old fellow in whiskers as well as any of them.” Captain Sentry
seeing two or three wags, who sat near us, lean with an attentive
ear toward Sir Roger, and fearing lest they should smoke the knight,
plucked him by the elbow, and whispered something in his ear, that
lasted till the opening of the fifth act. The knight was wonderfully
attentive to the account which Orestes gives of Pyrrhus’s death; and
at the conclusion of it, told me it was such a bloody piece of work
that he was glad it was not done upon the stage. Seeing afterwards
Orestes in his raving fit, he grew more than ordinary serious, and took
occasion to moralize (in his way) upon an evil conscience; adding that
Orestes in his madness, looked as if he saw something.
As we were the first that came into the house, so we were the last
that went out of it; being resolved to have a clear passage for our
old friend, whom we did not care to venture among the justling of the
crowd. Sir Roger went out fully satisfied with his entertainment, and
we guarded him to his lodging in the same manner that we brought him to
the playhouse; being highly pleased, for my own part, not only with the
performance of the excellent piece which had been presented, but with
the satisfaction which it had given the old man.
* * * * *
_Note._ Much as the simple knight seemed to have been pleased with the
play, _The Distrest Mother_ was a dull version by Ambrose Philips of
Racine’s _Andromaque_. Fielding made a burlesque of it in his _Covent
Garden Tragedy_, 1712. The _Committee_, to which Sir Roger refers, had
a sub-title by which it was better known, _The Faithful Irishman_.
It was written by Robert Howard, Dryden’s brother-in-law, and first
produced in 1665.
* * * * *
A country cousin could no more pass a week in London in those days
without going to Vauxhall, than could a countryman stay any length of
time in New York without finding his way to Coney Island. The earliest
mention of the place is in Evelyn’s diary, 2nd July, 1661, when he went
to see the “New Spring Garden at Lambeth; a pretty contrived plantation
where sometimes they would have music and sit upon barges on the
water.” Charles II, who missed nothing in the line of gaiety, had built
for him “a fine room, the inside all of looking glass, and fountains
very pleasant to behold,” which, the grave Morland, his Master Mechanic
reports, was for the reception of “the King and his ladies.”
Later, little improvements were made and there was an artificial
cascade, a water mill, a bridge with a mail coach passing over it, a
cottage scene with animated figures drinking and smoking by machinery.
Samuel Pepys, who missed nothing, says, “July 27, 1688--So over the
water with my wife and Deb and Mercer, to Spring Garden, and there
ate and walked, and observed how rude some of the young gallants of
the town are become, to go into people’s arbors, where there are not
men, and almost gore the women--which troubled me to see the vice
and confidence of the age.” Tom Brown, a little later, speaks of the
close walks and wildernesses, which “are so intricate, that the most
experienced mothers have often lost themselves looking for their
daughters.”
In the days of Sir Roger, the fashionable way of going to the gardens
was by water, and an evening there, with a glass of ale and a slice of
hung beef was the usual course. Walpole, in a letter of 1750, gives
an interesting account of a Vauxhall party: “I had a card from Lady
Petersham to go with her to Vauxhall. I went accordingly to her house
and found her and the little Asche, or the Pollard Ashe as they call
her; they had just finished their last layer of red, and looked as
handsome as crimson could make them.... We marched to our barge, with
a boat of French horns attending, and little Ashe singing. We paraded
some time up the river and at last debarked at Vauxhall.... Here we
picked up Lord Granby, arrived very drunk from Jenny Whim’s (a tavern
between Chelsea and Pimlico). At last we assembled in our booth, Lady
Caroline in the front, with the visor of her hat erect, and looking
gloriously handsome. She had fetched my brother Orford from the next
box, where he was enjoying himself with his _petite partie_, to help
us to mince the chickens. We minced seven chickens in a china dish,
which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp with three pats of butter and
a flagon of water, stirring and rattling and laughing, and we, every
minute, expecting the dish to fly about our ears. She had brought
Betty the fruit girl, with hampers of strawberries and cherries, from
Roger’s, and made her wait on table and then made her sit by herself at
a little table.... In short, the air of our party was sufficient, as
you will easily imagine, to take up the whole attention of the gardens;
so much so, that from eleven o’clock to half an hour after one, we had
the whole concourse round our booth. At last they came into the little
garden of each booth on the sides of ours, till Harry Vane took up a
bumper, and drank their healths, and was proceeding to treat them with
greater freedom. It was three o’clock before we got home.”
Oliver Goldsmith in his “Beau Tibbs at Vauxhall” makes his hero say,
significantly, “As for virgins, it is true they are a fruit that don’t
much abound in our gardens here: but if ladies, as plenty as apples in
autumn, and as complying as any _houri_ of them all, can content you, I
fancy we have no need to go to heaven for paradise.”